A man named Heraclitus had an illness that made his body swell up with water. To try to sweat it off, he buried himself in a steaming pile of animal poo, but then overheated and died of dehydration.
18
Iceland has been so culturally isolated through history since the Vikings, that compared to other Scandinavian counties, people who speak Icelandic can still read the old Norsk sagas.
4
Pierre Jaquet-Droz, a watchmaker, 240 years ago invented a robot that could write, and the parts could be interchanged to say whatever you want.
13
Astronomer Percival Lowell believed that he was the first person to observe canals on Venus, but because of a faulty adjustment of the eyepiece on his telescope, he was in fact looking at the blood vessels in his own eye.
4
Ancient Greeks believed that redheads turned into vampires after they died.
40
A Kodak engineer constructed the first digital camera in 1975. They didn't want to go digital. They went bankrupt in 2012.
9
Instead of McDonald's tearing down a ~200-year-old Georgian mansion, citizens of a small NY town forced them to renovate it instead, resulting in a uniquely historic franchise location.
7